Adversity vs Trauma

It seems that today, everyone is suffering from "trauma." Only they're not.

A senior psychoanalyst once said during a talk that trauma is simply "too much reality." Like a Las Vegas hotel guest who tries to consume the entire brunch buffet, a traumatized individual is someone who has been exposed to too much intense experience in too short a period of time to integrate it. Overindulging in food interferes with digestion and metabolism. Force-feeding provokes indigestion, metabolic dysregulation, GI disease, even cancer.

Emotional trauma is undigested (unconscious) emotional experience that has yet to be processed into feelings, which are emotions that have been thought about, or brought to consciousness. Adversity, on the other hand, is not trauma. It is a necessary condition that involves struggle. And we are protecting our children from it--at their peril.